A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

An excellent book, an attempt to write about almost all fields of research, their history, and their status now. It is impressing how, after all this time, we are still unable to answer some very basic questions about ourselves and the world around us: take the global temperatures as an example, subject brought in the world attention by Malthus, around 1800, and reiterated again and again thought the years by several writers, arguing for the "warming" or the "cooling" of the earth.